New Site Design

Welcome to the first major redesign of my website since 2013.

The site was long overdue for a refresh, so earlier this year the team of Scott Kellum (design director), Kelsey Scherer (designer), and Roel Nieskens (developer) set about to redesign and rebuild it from the ground up.

Paraphrasing Scott, “The aesthetics felt dated. I also really wanted the new site to highlight the typographic range of Mark’s work instead of leaning on Proxima Nova.”

I met with them in April to discuss directions and suggested bringing back some of the pre-2013 aesthetic, back to something closer to the spirit of my original site design.

In spite of the fact that I was only involved in a few brief early meetings, they managed to pull it off. It feels like something I might have designed myself, and picks up a lot of my early branding—including the black/pale yellow/white color scheme and the spinning starburst on the logo. And yet it feels thoroughly modern. I’m incredibly pleased with the results.

How Did We Get Here?

In 2000, when I launched the website for Mark Simonson Studio, I designed everything myself.

The inaugural design of my site, which I used from 2000 to 2004. Fonts were not yet a full time business for me. Archive.

In the early days, I used a website design app called Freeway. It worked like QuarkXPress or InDesign, but for websites. You could create an entire site with no coding. It was easy to use, but didn’t much give control over the code that it generated, and sometimes you needed that.

The site design I used from 2004 to 2007. The biggest change was the addition of the font index on the right. Also, I had started Notebook—my blog. Archive.

Nevertheless, I was using CSS and Javascript on the site by 2003 and integrated a cool free content management system (CMS) called TextPattern that I used for Notebook, while continuing to use Freeway for the rest of the site.

A font page from 2007. The tabbed section in the middle was interactive, letting you easily see different samples and styles, albeit as low-res GIFs. Archive.

In 2007, I redesigned and rebuilt the entire site in BBEdit—hand editing HTML, CSS, and Javascript—after fully embracing the Web Standards movement, popularized by Jeffrey Zeldman’s book Designing With Web Standards, and leaving the ignorant bliss of Freeway behind.

The redesign, which I used from 2007 to 2013. Archive.

But by 2012, I was having trouble finding the time to keep up with the latest web development techniques—things like responsive design and (embarrassingly) web fonts.

My site in early 2013—the last version I designed and coded myself. Archive.

I realized that coding and maintaining the site was becoming a burden, and taking too much time away from my main activity—making fonts. So I hired the web design firm of Paravel (Reagan Ray, Dave Rupert, and Trent Walton) to completely redesign and rebuild the site to modern standards.

It launched in March 2013.

The 2013 redesign by Paravel. Archive.

It looked and worked great, although I felt that some of the spirit and personality of my earlier design was lost. Plus, while Paravel were top-tier web designers, the font banners they created lacked typographic pizzazz.

In 2015, I replaced the original banners with new and improved ones designed by Aesthetic Apparatus in Minneapolis. They added the element of whimsey and playfulness I wanted, while doing a better job of showing off the fonts. A few of them even made it into a Communication Arts design annual.

One of the new font banners in 2015. Archive.

The site got small updates and improvements here and there, and cool things like the Etna minisite, designed by Nick Sherman in 2020. He also designed some of the banners and an e-newsletter that, unfortunately, only got sent out a few times.

The Etna minisite is the reason Etna and all my fonts since have dingbats.

After I sold my font business to The Type Founders in 2021, they started rebuilding things under the hood, adding the ability for customers to purchase fonts directly (something I had dropped around 2007), providing live, editable previews of all the fonts, and making the site load faster and be easier to find on search engines.

And now I’ve caught up to the present, with the launch of this new look for Mark Simonson Studio on the internet.

I couldn’t be happier with the new design. It feels like home to me already.